Tesis para optar al grado de Magíster en Análisis Económico / Autor no envia autorización para el ingreso a texto completo de su documento / In this paper, an attempt is made to explore the relevance of a consumer confidence index in forecasting business cycles in the Netherlands. Furthermore, the possible heterogeneity regarding the information content of individual questions is addressed, and it is investigated whether this information can be attributed to the information view or to the animal spirits view. This paper constructs a Bayesian VAR (BVAR), which includes a consumer confidence index, the unemployment rate, a composite leading indicator, producer confidence, and the Michigan consumer sentiment index. The results show that for the 24-month-ahead forecast and the 48-month-ahead forecast of unemployment, consumer confidence explains respectively 3.96% - 8.06% and 10.25% - 15.99% of the error variance. Moreover, there seems to be significant heterogeneity among the individual questions in the consumer confidence survey. Finally, it is concluded that the additional predictive power of consumer confidence can be attributed to the information view.

In this study, we interpret Isabel Allende's La casa de los espiritus as a microcosm that portrays a patriarchal society. Our purpose is to study the underlying principles that support this patriarchal order and examine the mechanisms that perpetuate it and repress the potential for change. The objective is then to analyze the main female characters since they constitute a subversive presence which is constantly challenging the patriarchal order and which is potentially capable of transforming it. Our goal is also to demonstrate that the writing of the female characters undermine patriarchal discourse. Our final objective is to examine the novel in the context of two "histories": the consecrated male history which is deconstructed here and the extra-official or alternative one that tradition silences and that is represented here by the writing of the female characters.

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This study examines the image of house and home as the reification of our domains as living, dwelling, housed beings in three novels: Isabel Allende's The House of the Spirits; Anne-Marie MacDonald's Fall On Your Knees; and Toni Morrison's Beloved. Being human, we form through perception, build through forming, dwell in building, and perceive through dwelling. Through close reading and analysis, this thesis examines questions of: If we are how we dwell, then what happens when the structures and the spaces of our dwellings become haunted? What happens when "home" becomes a facade that suspends necessary elements of dwelling? This study projects that if we are how we dwell, the very nature of our being entails a constant questioning of what it is we allow a presence to in our how we form, build, dwell, and perceive within both tangible and intangible realms and the influential perspicacity literature bears within this process.

La esfera del estudio de los subgéneros narrativos es amplia e incorpora varias perspectivas en su campo de aplicación. La lectura del autor español Carlos Ruiz Zafón es matizada, con una focalización genérica en la tetralogía El Cementerio de los Libros Olvidados. En las investigaciones que rodean la tetralogía se destacan los subgéneros narrativos fantástico, gótico y policíaco. Sin embargo, en la cuarta novela, El Laberinto de los Espíritus, falta la exploración genérica. El propósito de esta monografía es investigar los elementos fantásticos, góticos y policíacos en dicha obra, y por consiguiente indagar si la clasificación genérica es posible según el etiquetaje de estas tradiciones o si la novela se clasifica como híbrida. El método es cualitativo y corresponde a la lectura atenta, en el cual una extracción de fragmentos del texto pertenecientes a cada subgénero narrativo bajo el microscopio de esta tesina sirve para el análisis. Los resultados obtenidos revelan que la novela verdaderamente puede catalogarse como una hibridación del fantástico, gótico y policíaco.

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The study of supernatural beliefs has been a major field in anthropology throughout its history. The study of paranormal experiences as such, however, has been largely left for folklorists to handle. This paper is an attempt to study the genesis, structure and interpretative schemes of narratives of paranormal experiences, specifically ghosts and hauntings, so that through the figure of the ghost (our perception of it, the ways in which we interact with it, how we read it and then talk about it) core experiences that turn non-believers into believers and believers into collectivities can become visible. Because experience is, for those who are said to have had paranormal encounters, what turns beliefs (or disbelief) into certainties, I have focused on theories that set experience and individual constructions of reality at the center of the actor-structure relation. My main purpose is to explore people’s narratives of alleged paranormal occurrences as they develop from individual experiences to cultural systems of legitimized meanings, in order to understand the processes that dynamically link micro and macro levels. I contend that a deeper understanding of all elements involved in the production of the personal-collective will further the development of better analytical tools to study the broad spectrum of cultural matter that escapes formal inquiry due to an old-yet-still-predominant divide between the objective and subjective, concrete and abstract, material and immaterial, public and private -dichotomies that lie at the very core of social and cultural theory. Through compelling analyses of ethnographic accounts on ghosts and the haunted I seek to reformulate the premises on which we understand this dilemma.

M.A. (English) / The main focus of study in this dissertation is the magic realism of Isabel Allende as it pertains to gender politics, specifically in the oppressive fascist regime of revolutionary Chile at the time at which her novels are set. Her narrative technique is identified and related to the environment of which she writes, with a view to associating it with the gender aspect of politics. The socio-political climate in Chile, certainly in the decades ot the 1960s and 1970s, incorporated elements of fascism, oppression and sexism: Allende successfully adapts most of her female characters to the revolution and its effects ...

This thesis focuses on a study of the female voice and silencing as well as on the use of the supernatural in selected works of literature from three different cultures: Isabel Allende's The House of the Spirits, Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior, and Toni Morrison's Beloved.